Description
The development of innovative technologies is a driving force to build America’s bioeconomy. The growth of current and creation of additional markets for biopower, biofuels, and bioproducts would leverage significant opportunities for job creation, increase the availability and use of renewable domestic resources, and provide environmental benefits both domestically and globally. Watch this video to learn how a combination of innovative bioeconomy technologies—past and present—are being employed at various locations across the United States to produce renewable and sustainable biofuels or bioproducts, by companies including Lygos in the San Francisco Bay Area, Quad County Corn Processors in Iowa, and AltAir Paramount in Southern California.
Text version
Below is the text version for the " Innovative Bioeconomy Technologies Video."
0:00-0:16
Chris Roach (Director; Roeslein Alternative Energy):
This is about food and fuel and sustainability and, you know, improving everything if we can. And I think we’ve got the solutions to do it, and now we’re just trying to figure out how to do it ourselves and then to show others how to do it, and help people understand that there’s a different way to get this done.
0:17-0:37
Molly Morse (Chief Executive Officer; Mango Materials):
I think what we need is actually a lot of different solutions. I think we not a lot of different options whether it from feedstocks or from materials. And I think we can have integrated biorefineries, where you’re using heat, and you’re using methane, and you’re using CO2, and you have a whole array of different things going on at that location. I think that really is the future.
0:38-0:44
Allison Pieja (Chief Technology Officer; Mango Materials):
Welcome to our pilot plant, which is co-located with the wastewater treatment plant, Silicon Valley Clean Water, here in Redwood City California.
0:45-1:27
Anne Schauer-Gimenez (Vice President of Customer Engagement; Mango Materials):
At Mango Materials, we really believe in a biorefinery-type model, where there could be multiple products that are made from one location. Like, for instanc,e at a wastewater treatment plant you not only have the methane which can be turned into bioproducts, but they have some of the solids, or even some of the water that is produced here that can also be turned into other products. So, we see ourselves kind of fitting into this larger ecosystem and working together, where sometimes potentially their wastes become our value, or our wastes become their value, and where we can integrate within not only the wastewater treatment plant or the methane production site that we’re located at, but actually integrate with each other in order to advance the bioeconomy together.
1:28-1:49
Allison Pieja (Mango Materials):
What we have here is the power plant facility which is approximately 500 liters, and this is our plant where we run directly on the with biogas straight from the anaerobic digesters which you can see behind it, here at the treatment plant. So, we take the biogas straight from the plant, pipe it into this tall vessel, mix the liquid up, and then produce our biopolymer, PHA, all in a matter of days.
1:50-2:10
Molly Morse (Mango Materials):
We believe at Mango Materials that we have a platform technology that we can use any form of methane to make a variety of products. Fairly focused on biopolymers right now, but there’s other things you can do with methanotrophs, or other processes using methane. So, if we want to look at a decentralized, revitalized economy where things are locally available, methane is really the way to go.
2:11-3:29
Chris Roach (Roeslein Alternative Energy):
We are in northern Missouri, near Albany, Missouri, at the headquarters of Roeslein Alternative Energy, near our project we have with Smithfield hog production. These are feeding operations that use anaerobic lagoons to receive and handle waste from the operations. We’re capturing the biogas and then we've installed equipment to purify the gas to pipeline quality. What’s more interesting for our project is using that as compressed natural gas which then qualifies as cellulosic biofuel. The larger picture for us is coming up with project solutions that not only look at how can we convert these waste streams into energy, but also how can we improve the sustainability of the overall farming operation. We’re thinking about how do we provide a solution that that average size farmer could adopt. We’re looking for solutions that are small scale, they’re modular, and that they can be fabricated in a facility in a shop setting. And how can we look at the use of their land and their integrated landscape, in terms of being able to produce biomass that could be used to produce additional energy. But also that provides habitat for wildlife and for pollinators and for general ecological services.
3:39-4:08
John Hake (Manager, Resource Recovery; East May Municipal Utility District):
Behind me are 11 digesters. Each digester has about 2 million gallons of capacity. And before the advent of this program, we were probably only using about half of that capacity. So now, we’re coming much closer to using the full 22 million gallons of capacity we have, but we still have some left. And that's why we’re starting to look at solid food waste. It’s a very local source, it's nearby, it can be trucked to our plant.
4:09-4:48
Jackie Zipkin (Manager, Wastewater Environmental Services; East Bay Municipal Utility District):
The waste that we get, in by definition, is really heterogeneous. So, we’re talking about, for example, the waste products from restaurants. So, it’s a combination of the, you know, vegetable stalks and stems that they cut off before they deliver it to your plate. So, all the behind-the-kitchen materials that become waste, as well as the postconsumer waste, when you’re scraping your plate off at the end of your meal, there is a lot of food that we don't consume that gets put into the garbage bin. And so, what we’re trying to do is take that wide variety of really heterogeneous waste, and turn it into a homogeneous feedstock for a digester.
4:49-5:55
John Hake (East Bay Municipal Utility District):
The challenge is that, while we had plenty of digester capacity we were producing more biogas that we could actually use in our electrical generation facility. So, that's why in 2012, we added a new turbine, and that almost doubled our electrical generation capacity. We hope to take more solid waste material, produce more biogas, and then in the future, beyond electrical generation, we can also use the biogas as a transportation fuel.
You talk to almost any employee at East Bay MUD, most of them will say something about, they came here to work to be a good steward of environment. I came here mostly to protect the public health, and also protect the environment. Something that I didn't foresee was like the next step in the evolution of protection, which is protection of natural resources. Because what we’re doing here is gathering or recovering resources from waste materials, and that makes it so that we don't have to extract more materials from the natural environment itself.
5:56-END
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